Some properties of RNA species encapsidated by particles of strawberry latent ringspot nepovirus

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Sequence analysis and location of capsid proteins within RNA 2 of strawberry latent ringspot virus

The nucleotide sequence of the RNA 2 of a strawberry isolate (H) of strawberry latent ringspot virus (SLRSV) comprised 3824 nucleotides and contained one long open reading frame with a theoretical coding capacity of 890 amino acids equivalent to a protein of 98.8K. The N-terminal amino acid sequences ofvirion-derived proteins were determined by Edman degradation allowing the capsid coding regions to be located and serine/glycine cleavage sites to be identified within the polyprotein. The amino acid sequence in the capsid coding region of an isolate of SLRSV from flowering cherry in New Zealand was 97 % identical to that of SLRSV-H. Except in the 3 ' and 5 ' terminal non-coding sequences, computer-based alignment and comparison algorithms did not reveal any substantial homologies between RN

Powerful Sequence Similarity Search Methods and In-Depth Manual Analyses Can Identify Remote Homologs in Many Apparently "Orphan" Viral Proteins

The genome sequences of new viruses often contain many “orphan” or “taxon-specific” proteins apparently lacking homologs. However, because viral proteins evolve very fast, commonly used sequence similarity detection methods such as BLAST may overlook homologs. We analyzed a data set of proteins from RNA viruses characterized as “genus specific” by BLAST. More powerful methods developed recently, such as HHblits or HHpred (available through web-based, user-friendly interfaces), could detect distant homologs of a quarter of these proteins, suggesting that these methods should be used to annotate viral genomes. In-depth manual analyses of a subset of the remaining sequences, guided by contextual information such as taxonomy, gene order, or domain cooccurrence, identified distant homologs of another third. Thus, a combination of powerful automated methods and manual analyses can uncover distant homologs of many proteins thought to be orphans. We expect these methodological results to be also applicable to cellular organisms, since they generally evolve much more slowly than RNA viruses. As an application, we reanalyzed the genome of a bee pathogen, Chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV). We could identify homologs of most of its proteins thought to be orphans; in each case, identifying homologs provided functional clues. We discovered that CBPV encodes a domain homologous to the Alphavirus methyltransferase-guanylyltransferase; a putative membrane protein, SP24, with homologs in unrelated insect viruses and insect-transmitted plant viruses having different morphologies (cileviruses, higreviruses, blunerviruses, negeviruses); and a putative virion glycoprotein, ORF2, also found in negeviruses. SP24 and ORF2 are probably major structural components of the virions